


Recessional

by chaineddove



Category: Nana
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-11
Updated: 2006-11-11
Packaged: 2017-10-31 10:23:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaineddove/pseuds/chaineddove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A downward spiral in the wrong direction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recessional

**Author's Note:**

> _"She's looking at me, straight to center,  
>  No room at all for any other thought.  
> And I know I don't want this...  
> Oh I swear I don't want this...  
> There's a reason I don't want this... but I forgot."_  
> -"Recessional", Vienna Teng

He plays at rebellion not because someone actually cares but because he can’t think of anything else _to_ do. He’s exactly adult enough to realize that what he does is playacting — the clubs, the loud music, the cigarettes, the girls. He can only get so far away from himself; the mass of laughing teenagers is not where he wants to be. The girls he knows are vapid and silly and most of them go home to frustrated parents who are trying their best to fix them. His peers steal cigarettes from the corner store and dye their hair and pierce each other’s ears for something to do, and they think they’re very brave but he thinks their existence is very futile.

He knows beautiful Ryoko-san with the greedy eyes is different when he meets her. He is walking home late at night in the rain, hair plastered to his forehead, when a taxi pulls up to the curb and the window rolls down. “You look cold,” she tells him, streetlights glinting in her eyes. “Would you like a ride?”

Ryoko-san smells of French perfume — Chanel, he knows now; she treats herself once a year when she passes through Paris — and her hair is stiff with mousse to keep the curls orderly in the humidity of the night. She touches his face, pushing his bangs out of his eyes, and smiles at him out of the darkness. “You’re a pretty one,” she tells him, and takes him home.

He feels awkward, excited and a little scared. His hands slide over soft, perfumed skin with little aim. “There,” she tells him where to touch. He does, and her eyes close and she lets out a little sigh. “Here,” she says, and “like this,” and he follows her directions almost blindly in search of something he cannot name. He has never done this before, but he thinks surely, surely there must be more than this: soft skin, harsh breathing, sweat. He runs his fingers over the soft curve of her stomach, her hip, trying to understand her, drowning in the smell of Chanel and her arms pulling him down into the darkness.

This, he realizes later, when he is lying next to her in her bed and shivering under a light blanket, this is what rebellion actually feels like.

***

She makes him breakfast as he sits wrapped in one of her fluffy white robes. He curls his hands around the tea mug and she watches him, amused. “How old are you?” she asks, suddenly. “About fourteen?”

“Fifteen,” he tells her.

Only then does she ask, “What is your name?”

“Shinichi,” he tells her, because there’s no point in lying.

“Well, Shin-chan,” she says, and sits down opposite him to watch him hold his tea. “You seem to be a little lost.”

“Yes,” he replies, and wonders why she is the first person to see him this way.

“Drink your tea,” she suggests, and he does. It’s warm going down.

“You should come by again,” she tells him when he’s dressed and ready to leave. She tucks a bill into his back jeans pocket and kisses him lightly on the mouth. “Take a taxi; it’s still raining.”

***

He goes to a piercing salon on a whim and gets his ears pierced. “How old are you?” asks the woman behind the counter, made tall by her screaming red mohawk, a dozen earrings at least marching up and down her ears, connected by chains.

“Eighteen,” he tells her, and smiles his sweetest smile.

He sits down in a simple black chair, closes his eyes, and feels a light sting. Somehow, he expects it to hurt more than it does, but when he looks in the mirror, there is a glimmer of silver at his right ear. “The other too,” he says. The sting comes again, and his left ear is a mirror of his right. “Again,” he demands.

“I don’t think so,” the woman tells him with a laugh. “You just like the bite, don’t you? You’ll become an addict.”

“But it looks so nice on you, Oneesan!” he compliments her, and she actually looks a little pleased but stands firm on her resolve.

“Go back to junior high,” she tells him. “Come back in a few years.” He does as she says, and is told by a furious counselor that his earrings are in violation of the uniform.

He quits school.

***

He stops by Ryoko-san’s apartment his third day of cutting class and finds her there, packing a suitcase. “Shin-chan!” she cries, genuinely happy to see him, and draws him into the bedroom and closes the curtains.

He understands how this works now. They have sex. She feeds him. She gives him money. “I’m leaving for a few weeks,” she says from across the table. “I’m a flight attendant. Sometimes we live out of hotels.”

“I’ll be sorry to see Ryoko-san go,” he tells her, and wonders what he’ll do with his time.

“You’re a sweet thing,” she says after a moment. “Don’t fall in love with me.”

“Why would I?” he asks, genuinely confused.

She laughs at his words and the look on his face. “Oh, Shin-chan. Give me your phone number. I’ll call you when I get home.” He has to look up his number on his rarely-used cell phone. She takes it from him when he’s done and punches hers into his phone book. “If you don’t go to school, you’ll end up doing this for the rest of your life, you know.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” he tells her honestly.

She laughs again. “You’re going to be very dangerous someday.”

***

He learns women quickly and to his slight disappointment, they are surprisingly simple. The ones who seem to gravitate towards him are alone and empty, and trying desperately to fill the emptiness. They, too, are trying to rebel, against too much quiet, husbands who don’t love them, years which can never be reclaimed. He cannot do much for them, but he can give them his warmth for a short time, and later, when he discovers their power, pretty words. In return, they give him gifts and money, pay his cell phone bill, and send him on with smiles on their faces. He finds nothing else with them except temporary release, but it is enough that he can sleep in their beds and eat in their kitchens in the morning.

By the time Ryoko-san comes back from Europe, he’s discovered he never needs to go home again at all.

***

Most women are the same, but a precious few are different.

Nana-san is like the older sister he never knew he wanted. She, too, is lonely when he meets her, but she is not like the women he knows. There is something burning in her which makes him remember that he had dreams, once. Her presence is charged with electricity and he finds himself drawn to that strange, unidentified strength within her. She’s daring and a little crazy and very sad, but she takes him under her wing without suffocating him, something he can appreciate.

The first time he sees her get very drunk, she looks at him with surprisingly sharp eyes and asks, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing, kid?”

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” he tells her, and smiles, and instead of chastising him, she says, “All right then,” and never brings it up again.

***

If Nana-san makes him think of a sister, then Hachi is the mother he never had. His image of the woman who gave birth to him is of a curtain of long, dark hair and half-mad eyes glittering with tears. He knows very well that not all mothers love and want their children. He knows very well that it would be better if his mother had never given birth to him. He knows these things, and yet…

Hachi’s love is strange. He knows she loves him; he can see it in every facet of her features when she looks at him. But no matter how he tries, he cannot find the _reason_ for it. Hachi wants nothing from him, and that, in his experience, is new. Even Nana-san has her ulterior motives, but Hachi simply is. She scolds him in one breath and hugs him an instant later, she feeds him simply because he’s there, she worries about him, she struggles and struggles to fix him. She never succeeds, and his life goes on as it always has, and she keeps loving him, anyway.

But she doesn’t _want_ anything. For that, he likes Hachi best of all.

***

He understands women, yet what Reira is, he cannot actually say. He goes on exactly as he has been until the first time he meets her eyes, and then things just seem to fall apart on their own.

She finds him in one of the underground clubs he frequents, she gives him money, she looks at him with amused, jaded eyes, she pays for a taxi, she takes him to a hotel. These things he knows. These things are normal. She stares at him a moment once the door is closed behind them, and that isn’t entirely expected, but it has happened before. He smiles and reaches out a hand to her, she steps into his arms and closes her eyes. Normal, normal, normal. Yet somehow, he feels strange.

She is the type he has classified as “simple.” The smallest touch makes her come alive; he hardly has to try at all. Her eyes are closed and her breathing is heavy; her hair is strewn over the pillow. He touches it, and it is curiously soft; the curls are real, not forced into compliance by mousse. Everything about her seems very real, suddenly — the gasps of her breath, her hands gripping his shoulders, her teeth catching her lower lip, something like tears on her lashes, a soft, elusive fragrance like jasmine rising from the waves of her hair. Reira of Trapnest is laid bare before him, trembling, and he doesn’t quite understand _why_ it should make any sort of difference, but his hands shake as he touches her. He takes her over the edge and he feels a little like he’s defiled something pure when she cries out with the same voice he has paid to hear all year. She shudders and holds tight to him, forcing him to let go.

After, she talks to him, and that isn’t new either, because the women who buy him need someone to listen to them almost as badly as they need someone to hold them, but it has never been her, before, and so it isn’t the same at all. “I’m half, you know,” she says, and he wonders if it would be dangerous to open his mouth and say, that’s funny, me too. He lights a cigarette and keeps silent. She looks like she might cry.

“Being human… it’s exhausting.” Yes, he wants to tell her, it is. She falls asleep and he lies awake, smoking one cigarette after another, watching her face, and wondering why no one has ever made him feel this particular sort of anxiety. He wants to wake her. He wants her to open her eyes so that he can look into them and find out what she is thinking.

He rises, dresses, and leaves a piece of himself behind. He tries and fails not to look back.

***

She takes him apart, piece by piece. His lighter is only the first step in a downward spiral he doesn’t know how to stop. She _does_ something to him, simply by being, by breathing, by angling her head just so to shoot him an amused look, by flipping her mane of hair out of her eyes as though it has offended her, by opening her mouth and letting her golden voice spill out. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do about her. When he tells her to stop paying him and tries to go back to the life he led before, she tucks more money into the back pocket of his jeans and calls it an advance. And so he keeps coming back.

He cannot classify her and so he cannot control her. She is not like the women he knows: though she sings like an angel, she is not like Nana-san, because she lacks her burning ambition, and she is not like Hachi, because she wants something. But she is not like the others who want him, heart or body or both—that much is very clear by the way her eyes sometimes close when she is with him and he knows that although he is holding her, she is not with him at all.

And he desperately wishes she wanted more.

***

“They tell me I look like her,” Ryoko-san says with a flip of her hair, spotting the Trapnest CD in his bag.

He looks at her, really looks, and wants to tell her, no, you’re too old, the line of your jaw is wrong, your perfume is too strong, you wear too much rouge, your hair is stiff with mousse, your voice is pitched too low, your eyes are too greedy. He is horrified with himself as these thoughts run through his mind and he looks at her, carefree in a satin nightgown, and hates her a little bit.

“You look worried, Shin-chan,” she says.

“No,” he says, and this is the first time he has ever lied to her. “I’m only thinking how very pretty you look.”

When she pulls him down onto the bed, he closes his eyes, and it is Reira’s face he sees.


End file.
